You can't change the past, but you can ruin the present by worrying about the future.

But by the time that I had nothing left, I myself was the lightest thing of all for fate to get rid of.

Man reaches the highest point of lovableness at 12 to 17 - to get it back, in a second flowering, at the age of 70 to 90

You must not think that I feel, in spite of it having ended in such defeat, that my "life has been wasted" here, or that I would exchange it with that of anyone I know.

No domestic animal can be as still as a wild animal. The civilized people have lost the aptitude of stillness, and must take lessons in silence from the wild before they are accepted by it.

I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.

While we are young the idea of death or failure is intolerable to us; even the possibility of ridicule we cannot bear.